12/03/17 Monitoring is a hopelessly overloaded term in tech culture. The term now carries decades of inaccurate and imprecise use. The result is that several people can be engaged …
11/27/17 In this, my fifth and final post about life hacks, I’ll talk about the communication process, clarifications across all key personnel, and a big approach in how some of th…
11/27/17 Someday, we may look back on IT as a subset of social science as much as a technological discipline. Because it sits at the intersection of business and technology, visibi…
11/16/17 In previous posts in this “My Life” blog series, I’ve written quite a bit about the project management/on-task aspects of how I keep my focus and direction top of mind whi…
11/07/17 I’ve written before about the minimal set of metrics that can serve effectively as application/service vital signs. One such set is the RED acronym, which stands for Reque…
10/13/17 SolarWinds® Database Performance Monitor (DPM) has support for monitoring Citus, a scale-out solution for massively sharded data storage and processing using standard open…
10/05/17 Modern systems can emit thousands or millions of metrics, and modern monitoring tools can collect them all. Faced with such an abundance of data, it can be difficult to kn…
09/21/17 Queries can be slow or resource-heavy for many reasons, but one of the most common is that the table doesn’t have a good index for the query. This is true for MySQL, Postg…
09/14/17 Observability is all the rage, an emerging term that’s trending up very quickly in certain circles even while it remains unknown in others. As such, there isn’t a single w…
09/06/17 Sharding is a mechanism widely used in today’s most popular database systems, an effective way to divide, categorize, and organize data into manageable chunks. In some dat…
08/25/17 Replication is a process common to virtually all modern-day database systems. As you very likely know, it can be a complex subject, especially when dealing with nuances th…
08/18/17 There’s a rapid shift taking place in today’s technology organizations: the role of the DBA is being redefined and increasingly replaced by other roles and specialties. Th…